


It's All Fun and Games Until Somebody Gets Buried Alive

by ignipes



Category: Bandom, Panic At The Disco
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-14
Updated: 2008-10-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 02:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/232778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ryan and Spencer are idiots, their friends are devious, everybody has bad ideas and nobody turns into Batman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's All Fun and Games Until Somebody Gets Buried Alive

Spencer rattles the door again, then gives up and sits on the third step down. "They promised me ice cream, the lying little fuckheads."

"Yeah, me too," Ryan says. "You'd think we—"

He stops and closes his mouth so quickly his teeth click. There's enough sunlight through the door that Ryan can see the stairs and the two-by-fours in the walls, scraps of insulation and crooked nails jutting from wood. He turns around and takes a few steps down.

"You'd think," Spencer says hesitantly, "we would know better than to fall for their ice cream promises by now."

Ryan reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone to check the time. "We always fall for their stupid tricks," he says. He slips the phone back into his pocket and does some quick arithmetic in his head. Twenty-nine days, seventeen hours, forty-two minutes. "Are we really that predictable?"

"I guess." Spencer sighs, then stands up and comes down the stairs. Ryan presses himself against the unfinished wall as Spencer brushes by. "This is so fucking stupid."

Twenty-nine days, seventeen hours, forty-two minutes. It's definitely a record.

~

  
One summer Spencer's parents took him and his sisters on a vacation to visit Civil War battlefields, and Ryan didn't talk to him for ten days. He wasn't counting the minutes, not exactly, but he was too aware of the summer winding down, the days of freedom falling away. They were twelve and thirteen, just a few long, hot days shy of thirteen and fourteen. Ryan was starting high school in a couple of weeks and Spencer wasn't.

Ryan didn't know what time Spencer's family was getting back, but he wasn't surprised when Spencer showed up on his bike and said, "Oh my god, you have to help me run away. I'm going to commit familycide if I have to be near them anymore."

"Familycide isn't a real word," Ryan said, but he grabbed his skateboard and kicked off, followed Spencer down the curving neighborhood street. They ended up at a park a few blocks away, sprawled on the dead grass in the anemic shade of a tree that had no business growing in the desert.

Spencer lay on his back with his eyes closed, his hands behind his head and t-shirt riding up. "It was all dead people, everywhere. It was like being in school. School with dead people and carsickness."

Ryan ripped up a handful of grass and threw it at Spencer's face. "I hate school," Ryan said. "It's stupid."

"Maybe high school is different," Spencer said. He opened his eyes to look at Ryan. He was tanner than when he'd left, with more freckles across his nose, and he frowned a little bit when he asked, "You think it'll be different?"

"Yeah. I'll probably be way too cool to talk to you anymore."

Spencer snorted. "Does your new school do personality transplants?"

( _"Are you—I mean, haven't you thought about leaving? What'll happen?" Ryan asked, once._

 _He was sitting cross-legged on Spencer's bed while Spencer jammed t-shirts and jeans into a suitcase. They were seventeen and eighteen, they had three and a half decent songs to their name, and Ryan was terrified of the answer._

 _Spencer shrugged. "It's just Maryland, not Mars. It's not like we won't be coming back."_

 _But they wouldn't be, Ryan thought, not in the same way they left, not if they did anything right._ )

Ryan laughed and rolled onto his back. He was glad Spencer didn't think anything would change, but he also knew Spencer was wrong. Summer would end and school would begin; there would be homework and new people, less time to practice and parents always yelling at them to get off the phone.

"You're the one who needs a personality transplant," Ryan said.

"You need a face transplant." Spencer threw a twig at Ryan's head and laughed when it hit Ryan in the nose. "That's the only way you'll ever get girls to look at you."

Ryan flipped him off and turned onto his side so he wasn't looking at Spencer anymore. The whole problem with growing up, he thought, was that everyone expected you to do something other than spend every waking minute hanging out with your best friend.

~

  
"The problem with that plan," Spencer says, "is that if we kill Brendon and bury him in the desert, we won't have anybody to play all those different instruments on our next album."

"I'm okay with that," Ryan says. He sneezes four times in quick succession. "We don't need a fucking harmonium anyway. Do you think there's asbestos down here?"

"There's no asbestos." Spencer seems pretty sure.

"Cyanide?" Ryan definitely remembers reading something about cyanide in mines, and while they aren't exactly in an abandoned mine they are _near_ abandoned mines, and there might be acid mine drainage or groundwater seepage. Or rat poison. Or something. He does not trust Jon and Brendon to scout an abandoned cellar for health hazards before locking their friends in it. Shane might have thought about it, but Ryan is not going to bet his life on Shane's ability to overrule Jon and Brendon in a kidnapping scheme.

Spencer makes a small noise, like he's either clearing his throat or trying not to laugh. "Why would there be cyanide in the basement of an old house?"

"I don't know." Ryan thinks about mentioning the additional worrying possibility of plague-carrying bats, but Spencer is kind of weird about bats—"All that _fluttering_ , seriously, how can anything that _flutters_ so much be trustworthy?"—so instead he asks, for the third or fourth time, "Why are _we_ in the basement of an old house?"

Spencer sighs. "We don't really need them anymore, do we? I mean, if we kill them, no one will care, right?"

"Definitely not," Ryan agrees.

In the dim light he watches Spencer lean against the cement wall and stretch his legs out, and he wonders just how obvious it would be if he crawled over to sit beside him. He wonders if he's even allowed to do that anymore, if Spencer will tense up and shift away, all the tentative comfort between them gone again, if everything he's been dreading for the past month is true and one horrible mistake really is all it takes to shatter seventeen years of friendship. Ryan swallows hard and clears his throat. "No one will even notice. We can totally do a stripped down acoustic thing next time. Back to basics, just melodies and beats, like, tribal or primal or something. It'll be awesome."

"It will be awesome," Spencer says. "I'll play the bongos. But no tambourines. I hate tambourines."

"Bongos it is. We don't even need to do real shows. We can wander the world like minstrels."

"Forsaking all worldly belongings to find purity in the music."

Ryan thinks about teasing Spencer for saying "purity in the music" out loud, but he's pretty sure that he actually said that to Spencer not very long ago, and he probably wasn't joking at the time. Spencer probably didn't laugh at him either, at least not meanly.

So he only says, "All worldly belongings except your bongos and my sitar."

"Sitar?"

"If we're going to be wandering minstrels, duh."

"Oh. Right."

"And maybe some clothes for when it gets cold," Ryan goes on thoughtfully. "In most places in the world we can probably get by with artfully placed hats and scarves."

Spencer laughs, a real laugh, sharp and sudden. It's the best sound Ryan's heard in weeks. "We'll do that, just as soon as we get out of here and murder our back-stabbing friends."

"I'll hold you to it," Ryan says, then immediately wishes he hadn't.

Because, he thinks mournfully, that's pretty much the root of the whole stupid problem in the first place. He doesn't really want to kill Brendon and Jon and Shane and bury their bodies in the desert—as much as they deserve it, the fuckers—and he really does love his amazing band and his life and everything that goes along with it. But _if_ —there's always an _if_ , because shit goes wrong and good things never last forever— _if_ things fall apart, if this fucking unbelievable dream ends, if it stops working, stops flowing, stops feeling like being _alive_ , if he really does end up fading into obscurity and anonymity and wandering the world with nothing but a sitar and an artfully-arranged scarf to his name...

The trouble is, Ryan thinks he might actually be okay with that, as long as Spencer is right there wandering the world with him.

Ryan sighs. It comes out a lot louder and more pathetic than he means it to.

"What?" Spencer sounds annoyed, but under that he's also worried.

"Nothing." Ryan swipes the tips of his fingers over the disgusting floor, drawing nonsense designs he can't even see.

"They'll let us out eventually," Spencer says. "Maybe even before we die of cyanide poisoning."

"I know. It's just—"

"What?"

"Nothing." Ryan says the word firmly, so there's no doubt, and he makes up his mind. The floor really is disgusting, but he crawls across it anyway, grit and grime rough on his palms. He twists around and sits down, his back against the wall and his shoulder touching Spencer's, and stretches his legs out so he can bump Spencer's foot with his own.

"Hi," he says. His voice fails before he can get an apology out, before he can even figure out what he wants to apologize for.

"Hi," says Spencer. "You get lonely over there?"

"I'm protecting you from the bats."

"Bats?" Spencer's voice rises sharply, and he snaps his head back to stare up at the ceiling. "What bats? Where?"

"Potential bats," Ryan says quickly. "Most likely imaginary bats. But if there are bats, I'll protect you." He pats Spencer's leg reassuringly and does not think about how warm and solid Spencer's thigh feels beneath his hand, or whether or not it he should lean his head on Spencer's shoulder.

After a few moments have passed in silence and Ryan has not moved his hand from Spencer's leg, Spencer says, "If there are bats and we're stuck down here long enough—"

"We might turn into Batman."

" _I'll_ turn into Batman," Spencer says. "You can turn into Robin."

"Okay," Ryan says agreeably. Wearing ridiculous outfits and living in a secret lair full of gadgets and fighting crime alongside Spencer doesn't sound like such a bad life, even though Ryan's pretty sure they would suck at fighting crime. Well, _he_ would suck, because he's about as intimidating as a limp noodle, but Spencer would probably kick ass as a masked vigilante. There are unfortunate victims all across the country who have learned the hard way what befalls those who try to steal caffeinated beverages and coveted salty snack foods from the Panic bus.

But still. It would be cool. As long as Spencer was there with him.

Strictly speaking, Ryan thinks, it probably doesn't count as a revelation if he's known it since before he even knew he was capable of knowing such things.

~

  
The longest Ryan and Spencer have ever gone without speaking to each other is twenty-nine days, seventeen hours, and forty-two minutes.

It begins with Spencer rolling out of bed, pulling on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, storming out of his own house and slamming the front door so hard photographs fall off the living room wall. Ryan knows the number of minutes because he spent the first five hours staring at the clock, waiting for Spencer to come back. Washing the sheets, waiting for Spencer. Making the bed, waiting for Spencer. Doing the dishes, waiting for Spencer. Picking up the mess, waiting for Spencer. It's not even his house, but Ryan has been staying here for twenty-three days and he makes it tidier than it's been since Spencer moved in.

Ryan runs out of things to clean and starts making phone calls. Spencer's usually a good driver, but he's easily distracted when he's angry and something could have happened. Ryan calls five times but doesn't leave any messages, and he's figuring out what he can actually say the sixth time when his phone rings. It's the wrong ringtone; the song startles him.

Ryan answers before the first ring has played through.

"He's not crashed in a ditch somewhere," Brendon says.

"Oh. Okay." Ryan wipes his hands on his jeans; his fingers are both slick and gritty with cleaning products and dust. "Can I—"

"Ryan, are you—where are you?"

"Spencer's house."

"Go home, okay? Just..." Brendon exhales sharply. He's frustrated, that much is clear, and Ryan is momentarily distracted by the strangeness of Brendon being the responsible one stuck dealing with his melodramatic friends. "Just go home. You can talk tomorrow, when you're calm, or whatever."

After five hours of cleaning and waiting Ryan is mostly exhausted now, his anger drained away into something a lot tighter, a lot harder to define. "I am calm."

"Yeah, well, Spencer's not. Just go home. Figure it out tomorrow."

"I don't—"

Brendon interrupts, "You guys are so fucking stupid when you fight. I swear to God, sometimes I want to kill you both." He doesn't sound angry, just tired, but with Brendon it's sometimes hard to tell the difference.

So Ryan goes home. He gathers up his things, finds his keys and locks the door behind him. He drives back to the house he hasn't seen in three weeks and walks through it slowly, turning on a light in every room.

He showers until his skin doesn't smell like Spencer anymore, brushes his teeth until he can't taste Spencer anymore.

He crawls into bed and pulls the blanket up over his head and closes his eyes.

~

  
In Ryan's first clear memory of Spencer, Ryan was a hero and Spencer was crying.

It wasn't their first meeting, but it's the one he counts.

Ryan was six years old and racing his Matchbox cars along the sidewalk. It was summer and painfully hot, but he doesn't remember the heat so much as the shape of the days, the freedom to play for hours and taste of Kool-Aid with too much sugar. Summer never means the same shimmering, dangerous thing to children as it does to adults. He remembers crawling on his hands and knees with a car in each hand, a red sports car and a black pick-up, and he remembers looking up when he realized another kid was watching him.

Mrs. Smith must have been doing garden work or something; there's no way she would have let Spencer play in the front yard if she wasn't nearby. But Ryan doesn't remember her. All he remembers is Spencer red-faced, tear-streaked, sitting cross-legged on his lawn and saying, "Max Miles put my truck in the sewer."

Max Miles was a mean third grader who lived on their street. At six Ryan liked just about everybody, but even he didn't like it when Max Miles came out to play. Max's favorite game was stealing other kids toys and throwing them into the storm drains, laughing loudly and running away while shouting, "Now it's in the sewer with all the poop!" With a little bit of investigation and a couple tries sticking his hand into places that scared the other kids, Ryan figured out that the drains were both dry and a lot shallower than they looked.

He looked around to make sure there were no adults watching, stepped boldly into the street and stretched out on the pavement. He remembers the heat of the asphalt through his t-shirt and the bright yellow paint of Spencer's Tonka dump truck in the drain. The truck was almost too big to fit through the narrow opening, but Ryan tugged it out and set it on the sidewalk, gave it a shove to roll it toward Spencer.

He said, "It's not really a sewer. It's just a hole in the street."

They drove Ryan's Matchbox cars around in the back of Spencer's Tonka dump truck until Spencer's mom called him inside for dinner. Ryan went home, but he left his toy cars behind.

( _"You remember all that?" Spencer asked once, during one of their ordinary, meandering conversations. It's a novelty to stumble across a memory they don't share, a story they don't both know by heart._

 _Ryan shrugged. "Yeah, mostly."_

 _"Huh." Spencer didn't sound doubtful, just surprised._

 _They weren't five and six and playing on a sweltering sidewalk in Nevada anymore; they were eighteen and nineteen and sitting beside a parking lot in Texas. The venue was big but it looked entirely too honky-tonk for their show. Ryan was certain they'd get their asses kicked by guys in Stetsons before they got anywhere near the stage, and Brendon had been making "we got both kinds of music, country_ and _western" jokes all afternoon._

 _"I remember you hitting golf balls into the neighbor's yard," Spencer said after a minute. "That was the first and last time I ever thought you were cool."_

 _"Fuck off," Ryan said easily._

 _Spencer grinned. "I really loved that stupid yellow truck. It's no wonder I decided to keep you around."_

 _Ryan knew it wasn't like that in the beginning, that he was the one knocking on the door every day to ask Mrs. Smith if Spencer could play, but he didn't disagree. He just kicked Spencer's ankle lightly and smiled into the sun._ )

So there were two little boys, three toy cars, a stretch of smooth concrete between the grass and the road, and hours of brilliant desert sunlight. It wasn't the first time they met, it wasn't the first time they were friends, but it was the first time Spencer was crying when Ryan showed up and laughing by the time Ryan left.

There's probably a lesson about balance in there, a moral about what goes around comes around, but Ryan's never kept count. He knows if he'd tried he's the one who would end up having a hell of a debt.

~

  
Ryan is standing on the steps again, pleading with their captors. "Are you guys going to let us out of here now?"

"That depends." That's Jon, and it sounds like he's sitting on the ground right next to the door. "Have you two talked about what you're fighting about yet?"

Ryan hesitates.

"I can hear you thinking about lying, Ryan."

"You're evil."

"We're helping," Brendon chimes in confidently.

Shane adds, "This is better than therapy."

"I hate you all," Ryan says. "If I could kill you with my mind, you would all be dead."

"You're sad," Jon says. "Both of you."

"And stupid," Brendon says.

"And stupid," Jon agrees, "but mostly sad. You need to stop that."

"Right," Spencer mumbles from the other side of the room, too quietly for the others to hear. "Because it's just that easy."

"We're going to climb the hill to take pictures of the sunset," Jon says. "We'll be back."

Footsteps crunch way on the dirt outside, fading to silence. The light through the cracks in the cellar door is softer, weaker now.

Ryan sits down on the steps. "They're not letting us out."

It should be that easy. It should, and Ryan can't figure out where they fucked up so badly that it isn't anymore. Easy doesn't mean the same thing with Spencer as it does with anyone else. Spencer's seen Ryan wearing Superman underwear and shared a Simpsons sleeping bag with him and helped him learn all the Backstreet Boys dance moves. Spencer was the first person to say "This song fucking _rocks_ " the first time they played their own music straight through, and he always fit right beside Ryan even though two teenage guys sharing a single bed should have been too close, too much.

"I don't really know why we're fighting," Ryan says.

Spencer says quietly, "I do."

"Yeah." Ryan closes his eyes. It barely makes a difference in what he can see. "Me too."

"Ryan—"

Ryan stands, suddenly restless, but it's too dark to pace safely. "You left," he says.

A pause, then Spencer says, "I thought you wanted me to."

"I wanted—"

The afternoon was bright, the sun through the windows almost blinding, and Spencer was flushed and golden and slick with sweat, loose-limbed and smiling as he turned on the sticky sheets and said, _Hey_ , just _hey_ , nothing else, but the word hit Ryan like a blow and he couldn't breathe, couldn't think. He jerked his hand away when Spencer reached for him, closed his eyes and rolled away and held his breath until the mattress jostled and Spencer was standing up.

"I kind of freaked out," Ryan admits.

"No, really?"

"I mean." Ryan waves his hand impatiently. "I mean, I wanted—I didn't want—

"You could have called me," Spencer snaps. "Or answered your fucking phone. A whole _month_ —"

"I was worried."

"But not worried enough to say anything."

Ryan takes a deep breath. "I was worried about ruining everything."

"Everything? What the fuck is everything?" Spencer is angry, really fucking angry, and Ryan is suddenly very glad it's too dark to see his face. "Worried it could have hurt your precious band?"

"Oh, fuck you," Ryan spits out. He wants to kick something, throw something, but it's too fucking dark and he has to settle for gesturing angrily in the darkness. "Maybe I'm worried it could have hurt my precious best friend and I wouldn't be able to help because it was my fucking fault, you asshole."

There's a long, heavy silence.

Ryan shifts his weight and starts picking the cobwebs out of his hair.

Spencer's voice is very small when he speaks again. "Oh," he says.

"You left," Ryan says again.

"It was my house," Spencer points out. "I was going to come back."

It should be easy.

Ryan takes two steps forward. The sunlight is mostly gone now, the cellar almost completely dark.

"Ryan?"

Another two steps, and he accidentally kicks Spencer's foot. Ryan kneels down slowly and crawls forward. He feels stupid grasping around in the dark, but Spencer doesn't move, doesn't say anything even when Ryan is close enough to brush against his arm, to feel his breath warm on Ryan's skin. Part of thinks he should ask, but the rest of him is feeling giddy and reckless and what's the point of spending your entire life with someone if you can't read his mind. He puts his hand on Spencer's shoulder to balance and lifts his leg over to straddle Spencer's thighs, sits down and makes himself comfortable.

"Ow," Spencer says, low and amused. "You have a bony butt."

Spencer's no more than a dark shape against the wall, a solid warmth to lean into. Ryan reaches out gingerly to trace his fingers over the side of Spencer's face, the curve of his ear, smoothing his hair back and smiling when Spencer leans into the touch. Ryan leans forward and asks, his mouth just inches from Spencer's, "You want me to move?"

Spencer curls his hand around the back of Ryan's neck. The first kiss is closed-mouthed and chaste and Ryan doesn't dare breathe. It should be easy.

"Still worried?" Spencer asks. He kisses the side of Ryan's mouth, the tip of his chin, the edge of his jaw.

Ryan hears the doubt in his voice and that's no good, that's not right, so he puts his hands on either side of Spencer's face and kisses him again. "Terrified," he admits breathlessly. It's hard to think with Spencer's beard scratching over his skin and Spencer's hands holding him close. "What if they never let us out? We'll die down here."

Spencer grins against Ryan's mouth. "Then we'll come back and haunt their lying asses."

~

  
Ryan knows what people think. He knows they think he started a band to give himself an escape, to get out of Vegas and away from his father, to hit the road running and never look back. He knows how much they believe it, how much they need to believe it.

But there's a part they're always missing, a piece of the puzzle they always overlook.

When Ryan was still stuck, still hiding, still learning the easy chords and hating that his clumsy fingers wouldn't cooperate, still struggling to match his melodies to Spencer's beats and wondering if they would ever get it right, he said, "We should start a band," because it was easy to say, easy to dream.

( _Every tour ends in about the same way._

 _"I am so sick of your ugly faces," Spencer declares grandly, hoisting his duffel bag into the trunk of his car. "I'm going to pretend I don't even know you for a month."_

 _"Okay," Ryan agrees. "Who are you, again? Why won't you leave me alone?"_

 _They get in their separate cars, go to their separate homes, sleep in their separate beds._

 _Twelve hours later Ryan's phone rings. He's in his kitchen, staring blankly into the empty refrigerator, and he dives across the counter to answer._

 _"Why don't I have a pool boy?" Spencer never bothers with _hello_. "I should have a pool boy to make sure there are no dead birds in my pool when I get home."_

"I'm coming over, but I'm not going to be your pool boy," Ryan says. "I hope you have food."

And Spencer says, "I have a chlorinated dead bird. How hungry are you?")

It was an afternoon like any other, just the two of them and music in the cool, stale basement, the rhythm of Spencer's drums loud enough to chase everything else away, and Ryan said, "We should start a band," because it was the same as saying, "We could do this forever, if you want. You and me. We really could."


End file.
